Maria Shriver’s spin machine is cranking up, and I expect a spate of stories to follow on how she is heroically pressing on in the face of adversity. On a personal level I wish her all the best, but on a public and professional level I am really fed up with women who serve as willing enablers of sexually predatory men. She’s from the Kennedy clan—it’s not like she can credibly claim naiveté about the lasting damage done by men behaving badly. Arnold would never have been elected governor if she hadn’t stood by her man at a critical juncture. Now, the whole false edifice of their marriage has come crashing down, while California happens to be in worse shape than ever.

Hillary Clinton is the modern-day standard-bearer for the “Smart Women, Foolish Choices” crowd. She and Bill dragged the entire country through their marital problems and their inability to solve them during his presidency, greatly undermining the Democratic party’s strategic interests in the process. Elizabeth Edwards is the most tragic member of this group, and the one whose story most clearly illustrates the distinction between private and public spheres of influence. I have profound sympathy for the situation in which she found herself in the last years of her life. At the same time, I have a right to be angry that, knowing the sordid facts of her husband’s child by another woman, she went along with his 2008 bid for the presidency. If the facts about his extramarital liaison had come out later rather than sooner, and he had been the Democratic presidential nominee, the damage to the party would have been incalculable. Where might we be today if McCain/Palin had won because the Edwardses were more concerned with their short-term personal fortunes than with the country’s best interests?

Aside from the damage done to children when their parents’ marriage is a sham, there’s a larger ripple effect when women pretending to have it all provide cover for their errant husbands. The latest high profile example is the current soap opera about the head of the International Monetary Fund who is now being detained in New York for attempted rape of a hotel maid. Prominent French males are laughing it off as no big deal. Really? According to whom?

Meanwhile, the more I learn about Barack Obama’s mother, the more I like her. There’s a woman who was truly ahead of her time, who blazed a trail of what it meant to live life on her own terms. What a pity she didn’t live to see the full fruit of her accomplishments.

President Obama will be giving a major speech on the Middle East at the State Department tomorrow morning. He has a track record of hitting the ball out of the park with these addresses, so we’ll see. It looks like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are giving him contradictory advice, and, even without drilling down on the details, it’s a safe assumption that I’m on Biden’s side. If my analysis of what Obama is up to is correct, history won’t cast the Clintons in an overly favorable light. On the other hand, if he waffles at this historic juncture, all hell is going to break loose. It’s not like everything will be determined by tomorrow’s speech, but it should give a good indicator of the direction in which the winds are blowing. This is a big deal.

Arnold, Arnold, Arnold, Arnold, Arnold, Arnold, Arnold, Arnold! As an LA Times blogger put it, “Hey, we’re all weak and we all make mistakes. But a domestic, under his own roof? Among other issues, that’s just lazy.”

There was a totally bizarre moment back when Schwarzenegger first threw his hat in the ring for the California governor’s race and then had to face up to legions of accusations about his history of sexually predatory behavior towards women. At the same time he was being quoted in the press as acknowledging that in the past (always in the past) he had engaged in behavior he shouldn’t have, Maria was out there piously proclaiming that she knew Arnold would never do such things. It seemed that nobody on either of their staffs had bothered to check if their official stories were even remotely in synch. Following, as it did, only a handful of years after the media’s obsessive immersion in more than anybody ever wanted to know about Bill and Hillary’s marriage, it was, like, okay, whatever…  But Maria standing by her man was what enabled him to get through it and get elected. Now it appears that, by then, he was already buying the silence of the mother of his “love child,” who was actively part of their family life as a member of their household staff.

As with Monica Lewinsky and blow jobs in the Oval Office, there’s just something particularly tawdry about affairs that are conducted right under the nose of the cheated-on spouse. Yuck.

A major problem the U.S. faces in beginning to transition away from the war-based economy we have maintained ever since World War II is the degree to which both political parties have enabled (and, not coincidentally, profited from) an essentially imperialist machinery. Bill Clinton passed up a historic opportunity to begin building a peacetime economy by cutting corners and emphasizing a rush towards globalization instead of capitalizing on the opening provided by the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of 1989. Now, after eight disastrous years of George “Frat Boy” Bush and Dick “Dr. Strangelove” Cheney at the helm, the genie is out of the bottle in terms of the entrenched pathologies of our capitalist system being unleashed around the globe. I expect the implications of that will be with us for awhile.

“In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries – the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators – the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile new element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.”

The Washington Post is running a multi-part investigative piece, “Top Secret America,” on the gargantuan shadow security apparatus that sprang up in the wake of 9/11.  There’s the place to start for anybody truly concerned about out-of-control government bureaucracy.  It’s easy to blame Dick Cheney’s Dr. Strangelovian inclinations for something like this, but it’s important to note that a mess of this magnitude couldn’t have happened without being enabled by Congress.  Despite mind-boggling outlays of capital and tentacles reaching into all corners of the land, the operation has notably failed in its mission to detect and prevent significant incidents of domestic terrorism post 9/11.  It’s like something out of an apocalyptic horror film, but it’s unfortunately all too real.  The question now is, what the hell do we do about it?

In 1966, a UC Berkeley graduate and Free Speech Movement veteran named Barbara Garson self-published a satirical play called “MacBird!,” which placed key figures from the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations within a storyline loosely based on “MacBeth.”  The play opened in New York the following year and launched the careers of Stacey Keach and Rue McClanahan, among others.  Even though the play itself was controversial, it’s noteworthy how rarely we see such epic treatments of political America in forms that gain any traction at all.  The relationship between Dick Cheney and the vacuous, pampered frat boy W, for example, is ripe for a Shakespearian interpretation.  The arts are the first draft of history, after all.  It’s always healthy to maintain a sense of humor, especially when times are dark.  What kinds of stories might we see if some talented playwright were churning out popular titles like “MacBubba,” or “George II,” or “Husseinlet?”

On Wednesday morning, September 12, 2001, Bill sent me an email saying, among other things, “I barely escaped being tarred and feathered or even burned at the stake as a heretic when I mentioned in a coffee shop that America has been attacking so many countries for so long that why should it be any surprise when someone retaliated?” A few days later he drafted the following letter, which he planned to send to Rush Limbaugh.  He emailed it to me for editorial comment first (I don’t know if he ever followed through on sending it; even if he did, it no doubt wouldn’t have shed any rain on Limbaugh’s parade).

While the blame for our recent terrorist attacks is being placed on our lack of airport security and failures of our intelligence community, has anyone ever bothered to ask just why anyone might want to attack a bunch of nice people like us?  For over a half century, bombs and artillery paid for by the American taxpayer and supplied to Israel have been killing Palestinian Arabs.  Has anyone ever questioned that this may not be a prudent investment of our social security surplus? Read more…

The Democrats finally have their mojo back. It’s been a long time coming. It’s not without reason they’ve been called a pack of spineless wimps in recent years: during Bill Clinton’s presidency they largely ceded foreign policy strategy to a Republican analysis and tried to run on domestic issues alone, and “shameful” doesn’t even begin to describe the behavior of Democrats who failed to seriously vet the Bush administration’s case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The stain of those failings will be with us for a long time to come.

But the tide is turning. It was clear in 2008, during the lead up to Barack Obama’s election, that a massive generational shift was underway. Under good leadership the Democrats have learned how to effectively fight back against unethical Republican tactics; and, meanwhile, the revolutionary technology of the Internet has brought light and air to age-old practices of distortion and obfuscation of the factual record. Many old-guard politicians have yet to catch on to the idea that they can run but they can’t hide. Lies and fear-mongering are not going to carry the day in the 21^st century.

Now that the Obama honeymoon is over, unresolved baggage on the liberal side of the aisle is starting to spill out and look a bit tattered. But two recent articles from Salon offer an interesting read on the problems the Republican Party currently faces. Glenn Greenwald writes about the irreconcilable differences between various factions of the conservative movement. Michael Lind’s piece draws parallels between the leftist counter-culture of the ‘60s and today’s right wing fringe activists. Read in juxtaposition, they shed a ray of light on the Democrats’ travails.

As a longtime Berkeley resident I tend to be acutely focused on pathologies on the left, but by any objective measure the Republicans in Congress have a lot to answer for these days. They mercilessly obstructed everything Bill Clinton tried to do during his entire term in office, then turned around and gave George Bush a blank check for eight years as foreign policy and the economy ran into the ground. And now they’re trying to blame Obama for everything that ails us. The jig is up; it’s just a matter of how it will play out.

(N.B. The phrase used to be “separating the men from the boys,” but that doesn’t suffice in this day and age.)

Back in the old days, when we were all divided and conquered and the Good Old Boys ran the show, their ways of getting things done prevailed. They could engage in their preferred degree of noblesse oblige in the public sphere and expect, in return, to be insulated from criticism of how they behaved in their private lives.

The cultural revolution of the 1960s changed all that. Women, minorities, gays, and myriad combinations of any or all of the above elbowed their way into the Club and took their seats at the table. What we’re faced with now, a generation later, is essentially a divide between those who assimilated into the Good Old Boys’ ways of getting things done and those who insisted there was a relationship between public behavior and private ethics, and that the old ways needed to be transformed.

The simplest way I know of to describe this is in terms of adult vs. adolescent behavior. When you start viewing public officials’ behavior through this lens, it’s revealing. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush behaved like overgrown adolescents during their presidencies. Obama and Biden behave like adults, but much of Congress seems to lag behind. I think what Obama is trying to do with things like holding a health care summit and forming a bipartisan commission to study and make recommendations on reducing the deficit is to switch the focus onto issues, principles and appropriate actions in the public interest and away from the personality spats that tend to dominate the infotainment sphere. It’s a welcome relief. Wouldn’t it be nice if the idea would catch on and take hold?

Hillary Clinton’s recent remarks about Iran veering toward a military dictatorship suggest that the Obama administration is revising its strategy on the overall Middle East narrative. As the rhetoric heats up, it’s important to remember that Saddam Hussein served as a secular bulwark against Iranian religious extremism. The ill-conceived and quasi-legal war against Iraq shifted U.S. resources away from the real fight against Al Qaeda and upset the fragile balance of power in the region. It’s vital to consider historical context in assessing current events. The situation deserves a whole lot more than having the media carelessly sling around Cold War-era tropes about Bad Guys and the Bomb.